We found lice eggs on my baby son’s head, so it was time for the buzz. He’s 20 months old and had just grown in the sweetest curls. But he’s too squirmy to have to search through his head all the time, and I hate the thought of putting poison on his baby head, so we just buzzed him. It made me sad.

Even sadder, I keep finding eggs and bugs in my littlest daughter’s hair, and she has never had her hair cut (only bang trims) in all her 6-1/2 years. Her lovely brown ringlets went all the way down to the small of her back. But enough is enough. Luckily she and her Dad just finished the Matilda book and movie, so she is thrilled to have a cute bob just like the lead character’s. And it does look sweet. But me and my sentimentality, I had to shed a tear first before chopping it off.

I feel totally drained. Every morning this week has been spent/wasted dealing with bugs. I poisoned all our heads Monday, but today I still found bugs in my little girl’s hair. Back to the store, more poison, more expensive stronger brand. Damned if there weren’t still LIVE BUGS in her hair an hour after treatment.

Sigh.

I’m going to try the oil treatment tomorrow, see if something more natural won’t do the trick (oil is supposed to suffocate them if you completely saturate your hair and leave it on for a couple hours. And it’s not poisonous!)

Anyway, enough bitching. Just in case anyone wondered why I haven’t had anything intelligent or insightful to say in a few days, it is because my critical powers are focussed on searching every strand of hair for bloodsucking parasites, and my eyesight has been encompassing nothing of interest.

I like having my hair long. I think it’s fun, and it exploits my hair’s natural tendency to curl, which used to manifest itself as tight ringlets (what I like to call “sproings” on my daughter’s head) but now, my hair being old and laid back, is usually no more than loose loop-dee-loops.

My husband likes long hair as well, but I know he supports whatever I want to do with my appearance, as well as in any other facet of my life. Other advantages to length: easier to make it behave, makes me look younger, can have more fun with it.

Sure there are disadvantages: a pain in the rear to brush, often looks scraggly unless I wear it up, can’t take a shower too close to bed time because it takes so long to dry.

But there is one major disadvantage that caused me to employ the assistance of my daughter plus the clippers to buzz my coiffure down to within an inch of its existence: long hair is a haven for lice.

I know… gross. I don’t know where we got it from this time. I’m thinking it might be the kid up the street that my son started hanging out with about a month ago. They sit on each other’s beds while they play each other’s video game systems.

We had them once before when we lived in Oregon… well, twice, actually, because I don’t think we did a thorough enough eradication the first time and so we had a second round. I had long hair then and it was hours and days of picking through every strand to get all the nits. Sick. Barf. Completely grosses me out.

The thought of asking members of my family to lose entire swathes of their lifetime in a, literally, nit-picking pursuit was more than I could stand. If you just miss a couple, just a mere fraction of the teeny, miniscule, nasty little eggs, then you’ve failed the entire mission.

I wanted to buzz so badly, but it made me sad to think of giving up my hair. I was sickened not only by the bugs but also by my own reluctance to give up looks for practicality. I hate to feel vain! I hate to feel my head crawling and itching and still want to maintain the warm tangly ecosystem that the parasites call home.

I am proud of myself that I cut it off, even if it took five minutes of crying to pick up the scissors and make the decision irrevokable. My time and my kids’ time is too precious to waste trying to make Mama look a couple years younger.

I’m glad we spent the afternoon playing Monopoly instead of fretting over Mama’s infested locks. Vanity be damned; life’s too short to be wasted worrying about being pretty.